The Thirteenth Loom

They sent for Detective Sergeant Cryer on the last day of October, a Thursday, with the fog down off Musbury Heights and every gas lamp in Helmshore wearing a yellow ruff. Mr Walter Haworth, of Ogden Bank Mill, met him at the lodge gate. He was a stout, careful man, and he kept glancing over the sergeant's shoulder as if he expected someone to be standing there.

"I'm not a fanciful man, Sergeant," he said. "But my night watchman has given his notice, and I've two women in the weaving shed who'll not stop past daylight. Three nights now, that shed has run."

"Run?" said Cryer.

"Looms. Going full pelt at one in the morning. And the engine's been dead since April. We'd no coal after the strike, and I banked her down for good. The boiler's cold. I've put my own hand on it."

Cryer asked to see the shed. It was a long, low place of soot-black stone with a north-light roof, and it smelled of oil, wet wool and the particular cold that gets into a building when it has been used and then left. A hundred and four looms stood in their rows with their belts hanging slack. The turnip lanterns the girls had carved for Hallowe'en still lined the window ledges, grinning at the room with their candles out.

Amos Entwistle was waiting by the lodge stove. He was sixty or so, with a face like a boiled ham and a Bible on the table beside his tea. He told it plainly enough. On Monday night, a little after one, the shed had started up. First came a groan, then a rumbling, then the whole clatter of it rolling across the yard. He had gone over with his lamp, and the noise had stopped the moment he laid a hand on the door.

"Stopped dead, Sergeant. Like a held breath. And it were warm in there. Warm as a kitchen."

"You'd been drinking?" Cryer asked, because somebody has to.

Entwistle gave him a look of patient, wounded dignity. "Tea and Scripture, Mr Cryer. I'm chapel."

Cryer believed him, which was inconvenient. He took his lamp and walked the shed row by row. He found nothing amiss until the far end, by the wall that backs on to the Ogden brook. There stood a loom unlike the others, an old Jacquard with its tall frame of cords rising above it like the rigging of a ship. A brass plate, rubbed nearly smooth, gave its number as thirteen. The overlooker, when he came, said the mill had bought it second-hand in 'seventy-eight and nobody had ever liked it. It had been condemned and stripped after the accident of 'eighty-nine, and its pattern cards had been burned.

"What accident?"

The overlooker looked at his boots. "A half-timer, sir. Lizzie Barnes. Eleven years old. She went down into the wheel-pit after a dropped bobbin. It's a long time ago."

Then Cryer looked at the loom properly, and his stomach turned over once. There was no warp on the beam, not a thread, and the heddles hung bare. Yet wound hard as a drum on the cloth-beam lay a length of black woollen cloth. He drew it out across his arm, a good yard and a half, fine and close and strangely cold.

A pattern was woven into it. A row of little figures stood hand in hand across the width, each no bigger than a thumb. Some wore caps and some shawls, and one had a clog just visible at the foot of the weave. There were twelve of them, and a thirteenth begun at the very edge. It was only a head and a shoulder, and the weft stopped there, as though the weaver had been called away from the work.

Behind him, Ellen Barnes had come in with the overlooker. She was a thin woman of thirty or so in a man's cap. She looked at the cloth and put the back of her hand against her mouth. Then she said, in a very ordinary voice, "That's Lizzie's shawl. That one on the end. Me mother knitted it with a cable down the edge, you see. There's nobody else had that."

The shed seemed, at that moment, a good deal colder.

But a policeman is paid to go on, and Cryer went on. If the engine was dead, something else had turned the shafting. He took the overlooker's lantern and went down into the wheel-pit, which lay behind the brook wall, directly under loom thirteen. The old waterwheel that had powered the mill before the engine was still there, rotten-boarded and green. But the sluice that fed it had a new chain. The pivot of its gate was wet with fresh grease, and the clutch on the great lineshaft above was bright where it had lately been worked.

In the silt there was a boot-print, a broad one with a nailed heel and a repair across the sole. Cryer had seen that same repair that very morning, on a man loitering at the corner of Holcombe Road who very much did not wish to be noticed.

His name was Jabez Nuttall. He had been Haworth's overlooker for twenty years, until the spring, when Haworth sacked him for pilfering. Now he was Haworth's most devoted enemy. Cryer found him in the Duke of Wellington at his third gill, and did not have to be clever. He said he had found a boot in the wheel-pit, and Nuttall set down his glass.

"Aye," he said. "I did it."

He had opened the sluice at midnight on Monday, on Tuesday and on Wednesday, and thrown the clutch so that the old wheel turned the shafting. The shed would shake and rumble, the watchman would run, and the hands would swear the place was haunted. Haworth, who was already trying to sell the mill, would find nobody would buy it. It was a mean trick, and Cryer told him it would earn him three months. But Nuttall looked frightened as he told it, and not of the law.

"I never touched a loom, Mr Cryer. I took the belts off the fast pulleys myself, every one, so nowt could run but the noise. It were only the shafting turning in the roof. I'd stand in the yard and listen, and I'd hear—" He stopped.

"What?"

"Nowt. A shuttle, I thought. Only I'd have sworn there were one loom going. Just the one. Way down the end."

Cryer let him go home to await his summons. It was the last night of October, and he thought he would see it out where it had begun.

He sat in the weaving shed from eleven o'clock with Haworth's lamp turned low. The sluice was chained shut with his own padlock, the wheel was dead, and the lineshaft above him hung quite still. The turnip faces watched from the sills. The brook talked to itself outside. When the chapel clock down the hill struck twelve, there was not a sound in the shed, and Cryer would have sworn to that on any book you liked.

Then, from the far wall, came a single, soft, wooden clack. It was the sound of a shuttle thrown once across a warp that was not there.

He walked down the row with his lantern, and his heart went like a half-timer's feet on a cold flag. Loom thirteen stood as he had left it. The belt hung slack, the heddles were bare and the beam was empty. Yet the cloth had grown by the width of a finger. At the edge of the thirteenth figure there was now a second shoulder, and a little more of a plain, round, patient face.

He took the tape from his pocket and measured it, twice, by the lantern. Then he put the tape away and did not use the knife he had brought. He stood there until the cold went out of the shed and the first cart rattled down Holcombe Road.

From Cryer’s journal

31 October 1912. Nuttall will answer for the noise, and I have told Haworth to sell the mill to whoever will take it. I have solved the water, the grease and the boot, and I am rather proud of that. I have not solved the cloth. I can tell you the warp beam was empty. I can tell you I stood three feet from the loom and saw no hand on it. A man in my line of work likes to say there is always an answer, and I still believe it. But tonight I measured the cloth with my own tape, and it was a finger longer than at eleven. Ellen Barnes came in at dawn and stood a long while with her hand on the thirteenth little figure's head. She did not weep. She only said, "She's nearly finished, then." I did not ask her what she meant, and I think it was the kindest thing I did all week.

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